The idea of human head transplants still makes a lot of people uncomfortable. It is one thing to opt for plastic surgery, but getting your head replaced is something else entirely. It now turns out the world’s first human head transplant has been conducted successfully. Not on living people, mind you, but on corpses. Dr. Sergio Canavero is a remarkable and disturbing man in many ways; that much is evident.

Successfully Transplanting Human Heads

We have touched upon the concept of human head transplants on multiple occasions in the past. One name is always connected to these stories, as Dr. Sergio Canavero claims he will revolutionize the medical industry as a whole. While his bold plan to conduct such transplants with living humans has yet to happen, the doctor has successfully stunned the world regardless. He claims his first-of-its-kind human head transplant on corpses has been a major success.

Canavero explained the process during a press conference last week. He and his team successfully removed a head from one corpse and connected it to another. This didn’t just include sewing the head on, but also connecting the spine, nerves, and blood vessels. All in all, this procedure took a grueling 18 hours, and might have taken even longer if real humans had been involved. It is one thing to do this procedure on a corpse, but a living human is something else entirely.

Regardless of the vessel’s life state, the world’s first human head transplant has been conducted successfully, and Dr. Canavero claims he will publish further details in a surgical journal sometime in the next few days. It will be rather interesting to see how this surgery was performed exactly. This is not an exact science by any means, nor is it something most doctors would ever attempt for themselves.

Said Dr. Canavero:

For too long nature has dictated her rules to us. We’re born, we grow, we age and we die. For millions of years, humans have evolved and 110 billion humans have died in the process. That’s genocide on a mass scale. We have entered an age where we will take our destiny back in our hands. It will change everything. It will change you at every level.

All of this is merely a prelude to the real drama which has yet to unfold. More specifically, Dr. Canavero’s team plans to go ahead with transplanting human heads between living humans. This will be done with patients who are paralyzed from below the neck. A full head-swap, as Canavero likes to call it, will certainly be a major milestone. However, its chance of success remains to be determined, for obvious reasons. Finding a willing test subject is not all that easy either, but that is only to be expected.

A lot of people remain unconvinced that Canavero can actually pull this off. While he is certainly a talented individual, this approach raises so much criticism and opposition that one almost wonders if it is worth pursuing. This procedure is extremely dangerous and unethical, and may cause lingering problems for people who undergo the procedure. Moreover, it remains to be seen what other long-term repercussions may manifest as a result of such operations.